Cool Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how we try to put them back together again. I'm your guest host, Margaret Kiljoy, and with me this week is one of your regular hosts. Here higare Hello. This week is one of those putting things back together episodes. The premise of this episode is simple.
Let's say you're newly radicalized. Maybe you were participant in the occupations and now the school year is over, or you got expelled and you're wondering what the next steps are. This won't be an all in one guide to how to become an activist, but it's sort of a sketch of one. It's also not quite a complete Summer twenty twenty four guide to protests, but there's some of that in here too. It's a magpie's guide to getting started
in activism. I want to start with my own biases up front, because it's going to inform everything that I have to say about all of this. I'm an anarchist. It's also been decades since I've broke into the movement. I've been doing this stuff since two thousand and two, when I dropped out of college to join the ultra
globalization movement. So I have biases towards things like dropping out of college because it worked for me, and I have You know, a lot of my experience isn't recent, at least my direct experience personally, but I've been watching people come into the movement for a very long time. I also have biases against authoritarian organizing and electoral organizing, and biases towards direct action and autonomy as models for
radical social change. I believe this is how you build a freer and better world by practicing freedom along the way. But you can adapt this to suit your own interests. That's not to say I have any interest in guiding people towards specific paths, specific actions, specific issues and movements. Exactly the opposite. This is my attempt to kind of give a big picture view of how one might get involved right now. I don't know if you knew this gear. The world's kind of in trouble.
I have heard this before. I have heard this said, Yeah, do.
You ever think about how your job is to be a professional chicken little?
Yeah? Sometimes I guess so. Yeah.
I mean, I'm definitely in the dredges trying to find what horrible things are always happening?
Certainly, Yeah, I would say even though the world is always in serious trouble, it's like extra in serious trouble right now, and we are in desperate need of people who dedicate their time, whether part of it or all of it, to trying to stop the terrible things that are happening and trying to build beautiful things and beautiful alternatives. So how do you get started? I want you to think about a couple different things that are separate from
each other. I want you to think about This isn't necessarily you gere, although you could if you want, sure, why not?
Yeah?
What do you care about? Like what issues are specifically important to you? It's the first thing to think about. The second is what do you want to do about it? And if you have a sense of that, and like also kind of how far you're willing to go. If you get a sense of those things before you throw yourself into the fight, you're going to start off strong.
Those things can change, they will change over time, but getting a sense of those ahead of time is a good way to figure out which door you want to go in, and then also to avoid some of the dangers that lie on the other side of any given door. What do you care about? What movements and projects speak
loudest to you? A ton of causes are interconnected, of course, right the fight for Palestinian liberation is not at its core a separate project than the fight against policing in the United States, for example, the rise of a global police state is everyone's problem, and so is the US and Zionist imperial project. Causes are interconnected, but you can rarely start by trying to fix everything. Usually got to pick somewhere to start working. You don't climb a mountain
by just willing yourself to the top. You climate by picking a place and then starting to climate. Maybe you're concerned about the police state or surveillance, or the erosion of rights, or Palestinian liberation, or fighting for prisoners in the US to still have access to books, or for LGBT rights, or for migrants at the border, or for the protection of the remaining national ecosystems and stopping the
expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure. Maybe you're concerned about something hyper local, like the destruction of a local park or the sweeping of homeless encampments. Maybe it's something a bit broader and more abstract, like you want to get involved in explaining the need for police abolition, but there's something, there's something that you want to change. As a place to start, the second question is what do you want to do? There's multiple questions embedded in this. There's how
far are you willing to go? We'll talk more of that later, more immediately, what is your skill set or what skill sets do you wish you had? Like a lot of times I'll just be like, oh, hey, what are you good at? And now'll go do that? But sometimes like what you're good at that isn't what you want to be doing. And it's also totally okay to be like, well what do I want to be good at? Like what do I want to be trying to focus on what do you have to offer the revolution or
what do you wish you had to offer? Are you in med school or have other first aid or medical experience. Maybe you want to plug in with your local street medics. Are you studying law? Movement lawyers need paralegal help, and there are groups that use volunteers to get people out of jail or through difficult court cases. If graphic design is your passion. This is me referencing a meme from
a million years ago and totally winning people over. Every group that exists needs help with their flyers or Instagram
slideshows or whatever the fuck that is certainly the case. Yeah. No, it's funny too, right, because it's like it's one of those things where if you do graphic design, you sort of think like, oh, everyone sort of does this or whatever, right, and then I've been part of groups where people are like, no one knows how to do this at all, and everything is that we make as garbage, you know.
Yeah, although there is actually a care full needle to thread in this vein, because if you've had enough experience, you can kind of figure out what type of action it's gonna be based on how well designed and the flyer.
Is, yeah, and which way. If it's kind of corporate well designed, it's like gonna tie into electoral politics and be born. But if it's hip and well designed, it's a riot.
Well.
Sometimes there's sometimes there's some like very like well designed flyers that are not like very electoral, but they're like, okay, this will be a marge, will be some speeches. We'll kind of walk around a little bit because it's like a very well polataild flyer versus when you have like a white background of big block attacks, maybe one poorly cropped picture, you're like, okay, this is obviously a riot flyer.
Yeah, okay, okay.
It takes a degree of subtlety to get the instinctal difference when you're looking at a collection of flyers that are going out.
No.
See.
This is interesting to me because in like about fifteen years ago, the people throwing the best riots were like a bunch of graphic designers, and so it was the specific h yeah, okay, okay, well you know, and actually, as a good graphic designer knows the language that they are speaking with and is what they're communicating, So that might be what you want to do is get involved in making the flyers. If you spend all day on Twitter.
A lot of activist groups can't find someone to run their social media, or they have people who run it very badly. Sometimes being an extrovert is a superpower. Building strong movements means building strong communities, and every meeting and party needs someone willing to introduce themselves to the new people and help them figure out where to go. The best activist meetings I've ever been to have like someone who's there to sit next to new people and explain
what's going on. Also, if you can plan a party, you can plan a benefit show to money for bail funds. There's kind of this like like whenever I talk about this, like, oh, everyone has their place and people are like, why don't I'm a fucking bookkeeper, and I'm like, oh my god, we need you, or like, you know, all kinds of different skill sets that people like don't think apply actually do project manager. Yeah, we're we're not all instinctively good
at that, you know. And so the quickest way to sum this part of it up is you think about what's wrong, and you think about what you're good at, and then you get together with other people and apply what you're good at to stopping what's wrong. That is the like one sentence version of how to start getting involved in making the world better. But the last part of it that I want the like question of it
beforehand is risk analysis. It is very easy to get swept up in the moment and go beyond your comfort zone in terms of risk in a lot of different environments. The more you have sorted out ahead of time about what kinds of actions you're comfortable with strategically, morally, and personally. The easier it is to stick to your decisions when
things get hard. For example, you might tell yourself, I will risk arrest, but I will not get arrested on purpose because I have a massage license I don't want to lose, or I have kids at home, or I'm undocumented, or I don't like the idea of jail. Whatever your reason is, there's plenty of reasons to make that decision. You might be willing to risk arrest, like be in a hectic riot, but you're not willing to lock your
neck to a bulldozer. So when you go to the planning meeting for the lock your neck to a bulldozer action and you're trying to figure out who wants to lock their neck to the bulldozer, you've already made up your mind and you're less likely to kind of pressure yourself into volunteering.
Or feel pressured by others.
Yeah, I'm imagining the positive version. Well, okay, because it's very rarely someone's like, hey, gear been a while since you locked your neck to anything, and it's usually more like man, it just sure would be good if someone was bold and noble enough to just step up right now now and then yeah yeah, yeah. I mean I've organized some of my friends arrests before, and it's it's not always that's not always the strategy that people want to be doing. Anyway, I'm just using this as an example,
like a kind of Earth First style thing. If you know what your risk models are, you can make better decisions. Maybe you're fine with a spirited march, but as soon as windows start getting broken, you're like, you know, I want to leave. That's going to not be my scene. You know, I'm not mad that the people did it, but it's not what I am willing to get arrested in response to. It's also important to know your risk levels, which kind of course shift because there are predators in
the ranks of direct action activists. I don't know if you knew this, gre there's a shadowy, unaccountable group that tries to get people to break laws. They're called the FEDS. They're called the FBI. They have a history going back decades and then trapping people by coming up with bomb
plots or ars and plots or whatever. And we're not going to go into this in depth in this episode, but if you want to do more research, people should look up They should read about cointel pro it's an acronym, or read about the case of Eric McDavid, or read about how the FBI set up Muslim Americans in the wake of nine to eleven. But another thing you should go into all this knowing is that that doesn't mean that everyone who wants to do those kinds of actions is working with the Feds.
Yeah, and you shouldn't go around accusing everyone you don't like of possibly being a secret and federal agent.
Because you know who likes accusing people of being federal agents.
Yeah.
And also our sponsors they don't, they don't. They're all great. They might, they might, I don't know. I can't really speak to them, but here they are, they can speak to you, and we're back. That is a thing that is absolutely worth anyone who's getting involved in activism, especially direct action activism, including above grounds some of this obedient
style action. It is really worth understanding the ways in which federal oppression works, and how federal oppression works often by the fear of federal oppression and getting people to spread paranoia and so as a general rule, The way that I've always heard it talked about is that it's like you never want to be like, hey, I think that guy's a fed. Instead you're like, hey, guy, that kind of behavior is disruptive and leads towards bad things, you know, Like yeah.
And I think I even have some hesitation to just be like you should just just go google co intel pro and learn all about it, because I feel like that can also lead to someone kind of falling down like some conspiracy brained rabbit holes, and like, I've gotten the best information by just talking to older people who've been in the movement for a while, and like just like if someone had like over ten years of experience and they're like, you can learn a lot about what
has happened before through just like actual, like in person conversations. And I have found that to be much more useful than just like going down like a Google rabbit hole, because that can just kind of lead to I think slightly even slightly more like paranoid thinking or just it just becomes like less applicable than like, hey, you have like a friend of a friend who's like done this for a while, and you just ask, hey, like what if what do you know about this sort of thing?
Now you're right, what are your experiences of kind of of facing like repression in the past. The true chances are some of them will probably know people who've either turned out to be like informants, has started informing or were we're bad actors from the from the get go, like it's it does, it does happen. And there's even been case it's not even just like stuff from ten fifteen years ago. There's a lot of that stuff post twenty twenty. Some really some stuff in in Chicago, some
stuff in Colorado Springs have gotten decent news coverage. I think you can also you can look to articles specifically of the Colorado Springs infiltration that the FBI was running around twenty twenty. I think that's a really useful case study for a more recent version as opposed to like the green scare stuff from at this point like twenty years ago.
No, No, it's true, and there's a good there's actually a good podcast series where I liked it called Alphabet Boys. The first season is about that case. No, that's a good point that you that random internet search is not the way to get this kind of information. This information, like you'll Honestly, it's kind of funny. I would trust a random zine in a radical bookstore far more than I would trust a Google search result. Agreed, which is
not true for everything like healthcare. Well, you're gonna get shit answers no matter what if you do that. Yes, yes, the internet is gonna tell you of cancer and the zine's gonna tell you that t tre oil will fix it.
Yes, there we go.
Yeah, yeah, no, that is actually a very good point, and it is the kind of thing that yeah, the longer you're involved, the more you're just like, oh yeah, yeh, the you know my ex who's a snitch that sucks?
Yeah, you know.
Anyway, now you have what you care about, what your skills are in your risk analysis, it's time to get started. How there's two basic ways, and they're not really a dichotomy. But you can plug into something that exists and you can start something of your own, and both are valid and both have advantages and disadvantages. There are structures and movements that are already in place that are desperate for
your help. There's a catch. Many, not all, but many of the more reasonable groups are challenging to break into. Very few groups have a truly open door policy, and those that do honestly sometimes or suspect. Yeah, some of those people are just trying to use you. They're trying to suck you into a political political cult, or use your energy and burn you out for some vaguely progressive
politician or activist cause. Oh. Either way, you're going to need to exercise some common sense and do some reading and research about what you're getting into. The best publicly accessible groups and movements are the ones that are organized from the bottom up, because the participants themselves have a say in what's happening. There is less ability to be sucked into a cult and used. That's not to say it's impossible, and there are such things as decentralized cults that don't do any you know.
Many such cases.
Yeah, but I know it's easy and convenient to join a group that'll just tell you what to do. It's very nice to imagine that there's benevolent people who will just do the hard part of making decisions and you can just show up and clock in and listen to what they have to say and make the world a better place. This is rarely, if ever the case, I can't point to examples of it being the case. Movements
that maintain everyone's autonomy. Instead, I think are what are interesting, and they often do it by not being a group at all, just a movement. The uprisings of twenty twenty, I think are a a brilliant example of this. There's not the group that organized no, And.
There's a lot of smaller, smaller groups, whether that be some like informal organizations, formal organizations, or just like groups of friends that it was. It's made up of a whole bunch of these smaller groups. And I think a lot, a lot of times the best case scenario in many cases is if you have like a friend or too, because you shouldn't really showed things alone. I would say, but if you have a friend or two, go with
the friender too, just like just go to things. And if you go to enough things and people see you, you can chat with people, you can start learning more about kind of what the different mechanisms in each different city, and each each even't seen how how they operate. It's it's kind of silly just to be like no, you just like have to like show up. But like that
is kind of a lot of how it works. You'll maybe hear about a Instagram account that posts flyers for semi weekly like picnics organized by some of these same people, and then you can go to events like that and learn to like soci And it really just does require a degree of just showing up. And you shouldn't go by yourself. You should if you you should ideally have a friend or too that you that is that they
would be okay going with you. But then you'll you'll find people to connect with and you'll kind of maybe find a different group of people that you want to start hanging out with more. I think in general that's kind of how the best case scenario works, as opposed to like joining like a big above ground organization which is just going to use your body as a tool to get arrested as or just treat you as disposable or in other cases just be actually kind of like abuse.
Of I agree with that, and that's some of that we're going to get into also. But yeah, no, and I will say overall, absolutely it is better to do those things with friends. I didn't I started going to things alone. That has something to do with my temperament, and that has something to do with my social standing when I was in college and decided to get involved in the movement. But overall, that is the best practice.
But if you're listening to this and you're like, I don't have friends I can go do this stuff with, there are more risks involved, and you're also kind of stuck. You're gonna go to a lot of things where no one will talk to you, yeah, you know, and you can't necessarily expect that people talk to you immediately or like, and you're gonna have to be a little bit more self motivated.
Yeah, and if you're going to a zine fair, you can chow some people at like the tables. When you're looking for a zine, it's like it's, yeah, now everyone's gonna want to get into a deep personal conversation with a stranger they met at at an event like this, because it also has like security risks. But yeah, I mean, it's it's going to require a little bit of uncomfortable social interactions, which for yeah, for someone like you or me who did go to a lot of these things just by ourselves.
You know, it just it just kind of.
Takes more time, No, totally, And I think actually zine fairs and things like that, and anarchist book fairs and all that are like really good examples of places that are publicly facing that are designed for people to interact with each other. And also, like one of the main pieces of advice that we have is be brave, right, and we talk about that in terms of like street actions. But like, yeah, okay, also social anxiety exactly exactly because how much of so social anxiety will become like an
inhibiting factor, similar to like the state. Not saying those things are equal, but they can both like inhibit you from doing things, and it's both you can you can kind of approach it via similar means of trying to like overcome this thing that is limiting your autonomy. Yeah, no, totally. So to go back to, if you're joining an existing group, some groups maintain everyone's autonomy by being structured horizontally. Some groups that exist as a structure will do it by
being structured horizontally. If you found yourself for go ahead, claim to be structured horizontally as well. No, it's true, but like like if you join a local Earth first chapter, you're going to find there's absolutely informal hierarchies that exist within these things, and they're like worth being aware of. But the decision about who's to lock their neck to the bulldozer is going to involve everyone who might lock their neck to the bulldozer.
Yeah, it's not the same as like the DSA or the PSL like it's it's going to be a very a very different, uh organizational structure.
Yeah, exactly. And so you know, you want to be part of the decision making about locking your neck to a bulldozer because it's your neck on the line. That's my best joke in the whole script. I'm sorry, we'll just move past it quickly. Thanks. Plugging into an existing project is often the good first step. What I did personally I started showing up to the meetings of this radical media project, Indie Media. I had film skills, and
soon enough I found myself in the film collective. I spent a year or two bouncing around from demonstration to demonstration, coordinating with all the radical videographers to collect everyone's footage and edit together news of its about what had happened. While we collectively fostered a culture of like respectful riot videography.
I did not realize we had that similar background.
Oh yeah, no, that it's interesting because I don't I don't do that stuff anymore. But that was like my thing for a long time.
Me either, actually, But no, I did not realize we had we had that. Uh we had that Overlapp.
Yeah, no, and it was it was great and it was fun and we you know, we taught how to not film people's faces. We coordinated runners where in order to get footage out before the cops could get it. We'd make sure everyone, you know, someone, every videographer had someone next to them, like ready to run out of the situation.
Take this SD card and run yep, exactly.
And I started off by joining an existing group that was doing this, but within a few months I was doing it independently and coordinating with different groups that came together at all these different summit protests because I was a known entity to people. You know, it was fun. I dropped out of school where I've been studying film and photography, and even before I would have graduated, a film I had edited sold out a movie theater in Portland. We didn't have YouTube, so we organized in person.
Kate, that makes sense, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
When when we shut the city down on like March twentieth or whatever, twenty two thousand and three, for to try and stop the Iraq war. I like didn't sleep and just edited everyone's film footage together and made a like thirty minute documentary about the day of protest and sold out a movie theater and I was like, damn, this was way better for my career than going to fuck it, staying at school. I mean, like, my name
isn't on it, but that like didn't matter to me. Sure, And then everyone the local news media got really mad because I didn't include the stuff that could have been used in people's court cases, like the time that people attacked cops on the bridge, because I was like, nope, that's too recent. We don't know what's happening there anyway. And get into certain types of groups is kind of like applying for a shitty job. A job that'll take you without reference is going to treat you like shit.
But jobs that are worth having require you to somehow have already been doing the job before you got hired, And once people know who you are, it's easier to find folks who work with And I think gear suggestions is like the main way you go about that is you don't necessarily show up to organize. You just show
up to participate. You show up to talks, you show up to radical bookstores and public events and zine fairs and protests and whatever interests you you know, And I would say that if you're going to actions and you're new, remember to be both brave and cautious. If you tend towards recklessness and being swept into things, maybe make sure you take less of a frontline's role until you get your legs underneath you. But it really is okay to
be brave. I think we're asked by the times we live in to be brave, and sometimes we're going to have to step outside of our comfort zone. We should just always look to make sure it's us encouraging us to step outside of our comfort zone instead of political actors whatever political ideology they call themselves.
And also if you can another another collective that people you know, these are like usually like medic collectives will maybe maybe we'll have like a radical media collective and another another one will be a jail support collective is very common a lot of cities, and not even if you don't want to take part in that, if you can at least get in touch with them to fill out a jail support form before going to things that will also be useful in case you do end up
getting arrested, so people can actually find you in the system and help you get out of get out. Just another another quick tip, I suppose.
Yeah, And if you want more quick tips, I've got some for you right now and we're back. Don't do anything that you just got told by voices that aren't me or there.
They were trying to sihap you. It is. It is the yeah.
Yeah. Another way that you might get involved in something is you Some groups are semi open where you can contact them and express interest and they might do some basic screening to make sure you're not like a Nazi infiltrator or whatever. I'm in the process right now of doing that with clinic escorting. It's like funny because i haven't had to like prove myself to any group in a long time, right because I'm like I've been around forever.
The clinic escorting group, it's like, we don't fucking know who you are. And I'm like, yeah, that's fair, give me that. Yeah, No, absolutely, I live in a place is not where abortion is not particularly popular with the right wing, and so I submitted my name and social media accounts to the to the abortion clinic escorting place, and then we'll go to a training at some point soon for folks living in southern California or willing to
go there. For example, there are groups that do border solidarity, working with refugees to make sure they're fed in house. If you listen to this podcast, you've heard James talking about this, and this is the first episode you've listened to, in which case, go back and listen to James talking
about border solidarity work. If you want to show up and distribute food and water, track border patrol activity, build shelters, do First DAID, all of that, feel like you're part of something because you are and are like saving people's lives directly. That's something you can likely get involved with, but it's not something you just show up at. There are a few groups doing that work, any of whom
you can reach out to and express interest. There's Border Kindness, there's Borderlands Relief Collective and Al Ultra Lado, and there's other groups like this in different areas. But these are the examples where I asked James being like, Hey, how do I explain the following concept? In general, you want to look for groups. If you're looking for groups, to look for groups that are grassroots and non authoritarian. You want to watch out for electoral campaigns, and you want
to watch out for nonprofits. This is not to say that the people doing these things are necessarily bad. There are local political campaigns that matter, and there are nonprofits that do good work. Some of the best political work I ever did was two years out a nonprofit, honestly,
but I was with one of the good ones. And structurally those systems, even the good ones, are set up to take advantage of people's energy and then like kind of profit off of it, right, and to accomplish goals that are often tangential to or even counter to the goals that they claim. For example, both politicians and nonprofits live off of donations. These donations are easy for them to get when those groups are seen as necessary, so
a nonprofit has a financial interest in not winning. Some nonprofits manage to maintain their focus and make themselves work to make themselves obsolete, but frankly those are the minority. You also want to look out for groups that are front groups for authoritarian groups attached to communist political parties you mentioned earlier, like the PSL the Party for Socialism and Liberation. Generally speaking, these groups will go to protests and run events primarily as a way to recruit people
into a hierarchical structure. These groups are often trying to control broader movements that they're involved in. They'll tell people how they can and can't pro test, and they're trying to essentially own movements that were built by others. So those are things to be careful around. You can also just not worry about any of that stuff and start something yourself. It is not the easy mode to get into the movement by starting your own projects. We're gonna
talk about a ffinity groups later. Actually it was just the thing that you kind of started to bring up, But it is very rewarding to start your own projects. It's like freelancing instead of looking for a job. There's no gatekeepers to cross, and the only person who's trying to take advantage of you is you. If you want to never not be working another day in your life,
you can freelance or start your own political project. It'll be what you think about every hour you're alive in essence, the idea here is to say, okay, what's wrong and what are we willing to do about it, and then get together with your friends and start doing something about it. This can look like anything.
You could start.
A mutual aid group, bookstore, an anti fascist jim to Trained to defend yourself from fascists. Illegal HRT distribution in band States, a direct action abortion collective, a zine distributor that goes to shows and parties with free literature about anarchism. A podcast about how things fall apart and how to put them back together again. A click of saboteurs who attack billboards. A group that draws attention to international movement prisoners and support them. Like you can do anything, And
that's one of the like things that people. Our society is designed to tell us that we can't just do anything we want. There's obviously things that if we do, we'll get in trouble eventually, but like you know, okay.
Like like if you make a podcast that's too good, yeah they will, they will turn on you, like Jesus, yeah exactly. Or if you go around you know, wanting to destroy construction equipment, right.
Not usually legal. I'm not a lawyer, I can't tell you whether or not any given bulldozer is illegal to destroy. That is the kind of research you might have to do on your own. The difference between start something and enjoining something is often blurry. For example, you can unionize your workplace. You probably should, but you might want to do that in the context of an existing union like the Industrial Workers of the World or whatever union makes the.
Most so the writer's field of America.
Yeah exactly.
If you have a podcast about how the world's falling apart, Yeah, yeah, exactly.
If you're going to start something above ground, it's worth looking around and making sure that the need isn't already being met by someone else already. Sometimes it's better to figure out how to help an existing bail fund rather
than start another. But also sometimes it is better to start another, Like it's harder for the police to raide, for example, which didn't used to be an issue when you start bail funds, but is now an issue, which is worth pointing out that like there's no true safety, you know, like when we talk about risk analysis, like running a bail fund is entirely legal and is the kind of thing that often is done by the people who care about a movement and are like not frontlines people, Yeah.
Aren't wanting to do felonies in downtown right Portland or whatever.
Yeah, the more successful a movement is the broader. The state repression will reach out to the fringes, not the French. I mean the bail fund isn't the fringe, but the less privery. The people who aren't committing the felon felonies. Yeah, are going to get tagged with felonies anyway, because the state being repressive is the reason we're fighting it.
They will still get their houses rated. And it's the same same thing ad demos. You don't need to be the one breaking windows for the police to tackle you. Like at a certain point, it actually doesn't. It seems to matter very little. I mean if things get to trial, then things you know will maybe matter a bit more.
But in like how police display the power of the state, Like out in the open world, it really doesn't matter if you're holding a sign or you're holding a ham or when you're getting tackled from behind by a big man with a gun.
Yeah, totally, which is why it's like kind of worth I mean that's like almost like what the answer to that is like solidarity, and by recognizing that to a certain degree, if you were at a protest and people are breaking windows and it's like, okay, well now we're all in danger together, and if that is a danger beyond what you particularly feel like exposing yourself to, that is probably the time to depart. Another pitfall to avoid
if you're starting your own thing. Any group that involves money will at some point have someone from that group steal the.
Money, including bail fuds. Unfortunately, it does happen, and it sucks.
Yeah. I have lost count of the number of times someone who was an organizer has stolen all of the money from this or that thing. And that's because capitalism puts people in absolutely weird and terrible positions. Right, it's still not okay for people to steal the bail fund, and we should stop them. But often the people who steal the stuff, if they're the organizers, they don't even necessarily conceptualize what they did as stealing. They're like, oh,
I'm gonna pay that back. I don't think anyone needs it right now. I just need it for rent.
In order for the bail fund to continue, I have to have stable housing so I need to use these two thousand dollars right now, and.
Yeah, right without checking with the rest of the group, and like, you know, like and so if there's money involved, you should set up some best practices around multiple eyes on the money at any given point and making sure that it's accountable to the broader group. One organizing model
that is worth considering is the affinity group. This is basically you and some of your closest friends that you feel like doing safe with actions with, whatever the scale of actions, you get together with your friends.
Or people you're not even necessarily like social friends with, but people you feel comfortable working with, because there sometimes is a distinction. Like you said, sometimes you have a lot of close friends you don't want int your affinity group, and sometimes there's people in your affinity group that you may not really want to hang out with like every week totally, but they're good to work with. Now, that's
a really good point. It's about trust rather than like getting along with sometimes you know, yeah, it might function better if you know, you don't all hate each other, ah, have some affinity yeah, yes, you know, but perhaps you have a shared affinity within the group.
Ideally, Yeah, it is if you're in a riot, whether by choice or by accident, you are safer and you can feel more comfortable if you are there with two or seven of your closest and most trustworthy friends or frenemies. These are the people who are the most likely to de arrest you. These are the people who are there to notice if you are caught and will organize your bail.
These are the people who'll be in direct commun You'll be in direct communication with during the protest, so you can coordinate your actions together.
It's figure out how you want to get into the area get out of the area.
Yeah, And so that's like a going alone is sort of expert mode, and so you should take fewer risks if you go alone until you are good, you know, and most people do not prefer and are not better
off going to protest alone. And then the final thing kind of tying together the existing groups versus whatever else existing protests movements EBB and flow protests are contagious, especially when they're rowdy and they show that they take themselves seriously enough to not just go along with whatever professional protest managers tell them to do, and take themselves seriously
enough to resist the police and authorities. It's more or less impossible to know which protests like sparks, will catch a bigger fire. It is good and useful to cast sparks and see what catches, or to notice when something is starting to spread and to help it spread.
Like what happened a few weeks ago with the campus stuff, right exactly? What are two places really start popping off? And you're like, hey, I know some people in college who are in whatever town I'm in.
Maybe we can figure something out.
Yeah, and so's if that was your involvement. And you're like, oh, that's not currently happening where I am anymore. What do I do next? Things like that will happen again, and you can also make things like that happen. Most of the time they will not catch. However, sometimes they do, and that is like kind of our job in a lot of ways is to organize things and try things and see what catches. I'm curious your take. There are
two political conventions happening this year. The Republican National Convention will happen from July fifteenth to eighteenth, twenty twenty four, in Milwaukee, and then in August nineteenth to twenty second in Chicago is the Democratic National Convention. They're basically always protests at these conventions to me, and I'm a little bit out of touch with it. There's going to be more this year, Yeah, that's what I'm thinking there certainly will,
I think, especially at the DNC. I don't have much to say on this at this point besides read up on the previous ones that have happened. You can go all the way back to sixty eight if you want to read about Chicago and the DNC, but also like the RNC protests from the Iraq War era, I think would be verally useful to look at. If you want to go back to like two thousand and eight and see how those protests were, I would just recommend reading up on it. I don't really have much else to
say on those in the moment. They're too far out totally to forecast.
Yeah, and I.
Yeah, that's kind of all I'll say at the moment. These will become recurring topics on this podcast the next few months.
So yeah, And so keep track of what's happening and get ready to go to what you feel comfortable with, and don't be afraid to be brave, but don't let anyone trick you into doing stuff that you're not comfortable with. But we need you. We're glad you're here.
Yeah, don't be.
So down that the school year is over and these campus protests only had a few weeks to live. I know there were certainly people who were really hoping that after we saw you know, what happened during April and May, that maybe this would you know, trigger things happening off campus around the summer.
And maybe they still will.
And at the very least, we have a lot of young people listener, possibly included, who like experienced their first example of like actual state violence like on them, and that can be a very radicalizing experience. So yeah, don't don't be so down that maybe your occupation didn't go
as well as you wanted to. Maybe you're protested, and but I think there's a lot of lessons to learn from what happened the past month, and they will become applicable, possibly this summer, possibly two years from now, who knows.
Like it's hard to say, but yeah, it's whenever you get that first hint of tear gas, you kind of become a different person, in my opinion, So congratulations to everyone who that hopefully didn't get arrested, and if you did, hopefully you have a jail support crew that is helping you out.
The other thing that I think that people never really recover from isn't the right word. The first time you see the police retreat totally, you recognize that this thing you have been taught is completely unassailable. The reason they're building cop cities is they know they are assailable and they want to be less. So well, listen to this podcast, and that's the only place you'll ever find anything useful. That's the fine.
I mean, I wouldn't I wouldn't say that.
Yeah, I know, But there are other podcasts that There's a lot of books, there's a lot of zines, there's a lot of sketchy noblog sites which may sometimes have misinformation and sometimes have good information yay. And you could certainly certainly check out Margaret. I've heard that you you yourself, had a few other podcasts what I do, well, if you want to hear a lot of the history around some of the stuff we talked about, including like the co Intel pro stuff.
For example, I run a podcast called Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff on this very network cool Zone Media. And you can listen to it every Monday and Wednesday. I just finished a very long, but I swear entertaining series of episodes about the Russian Revolution in the Civil War.
I've did an episode about the Burglars for Peace who exposed co intel pro by robbing an FBI office in the middle of the night in the early seventies, and all kinds of other stories, so you can listen to that or if you want to know more about the end of the world. I help run a podcast called Live Like the World Is Dying, comes out every Friday, and that one is Prepper Butt Community. Yep.
There, well go.
And I have a book coming out. It comes out of September. It's called The Sapling Cage and it's going to be kickstarted in June, and if you go to Kickstarter you can sign up for announcements about that. And it is the best book I've ever written, so you all should read it.
Very excited to see that. That does it for us, that itch could happen here. We will probably see you out there.
Good luck.
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website. Coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It could happen here, Updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.